Book Summary — Blood, Sweat and Pixels
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1 paragraph summary:
The book is an eye opener that every game takes years to make by dozens and hundreds of developers and artists and millions of dollars to produce. It’s an incredible depiction of the tears and sweat that goes into every single frame and detail. It has an emphasis on how quickly technology changes and the difficulty of planning creating a world and all departments coordinating. It also describes how every single game goes through a crunch period where developers work around the clock for months or up to a year to get the game released on time.
Introduction
Every single video game is made under abnormal circumstances. Video games straddle the border between art and technology in a way that was barely possible just a few decades ago.
Why is it so hard to make a video game?
- Interactive — they don’t move in a singular direction.
- Tech is constantly changing.
- Tools are always different.
- Scheduling is impossible.
- It’s impossible to know what’s fun until you play it.
I’ve cut out big pieces of the below stories. The book goes into the minutiae detail of each studio producing the games, which makes you emphasise with the difficulty of building a game.
Obsidian Entertainment — Pillars of Eternity
Traditionally studios had three ways to stay afloat:
- Finding investors
- Signing contracts with publishers
- Funding their own video games
the new fourth option became: Kickstarter.
For just under $6m, Obsidian made 2015’s best RPG game and secured its own future through Kickstarter.
Naughty Dog — Uncharted 4
Naughty Dog has two distinct reputations. One is that its staff are the best of the best, not just at telling top notch stories, but also at making games so eye-poppingly gorgeous. The other is that they embrace crunch.
The studio has an abnormal attention to detail:
- the creases on Drake’s shirt
- stitches in his buttons
- way he pulls the leather strap over his head when equipping the rifle
The details don’t pop out of ether. They emerged from a studio full of people obsessive enough o add them to the game.
“Perfect is the enemy of good. You’re polishing something that’s at 95% while this thing over here at 60% needs a lot of love. So that was what made crunch hard, because you’d get down into it, you’d have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.”
Eric Barone — Stardew Valley
The game sold 1.5m copies grossing $21m in the first months.
Eric was a one-man band who built it over 5+ years.
Blizzard — Diablo III
10 years in the making was released with a bug that didn’t allow anyone to log in due to overload.
Players started gaming the game rather than actually playing it because the loot drop was too infrequent and the difficulty ramped up too quickly.
The team took years to fix it, redesigning difficulty, randomness, loot drop, etc
Ensemble Studio — Halo Wars
Ensemble Studio has built a reputation on Age of Empires.
Age of Empires was so successful, Microsoft eventually bought the studio.
The studio was unceremoniously shut down.
EA — Dragon Age — Inquisition
EA was voted at the world’s worst company in 2012 and 2013 mostly because of the introduction of micropayments.
In 2007, EA acquired BioWare which made Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
Yacht Club — Shovel Knight
5 developers who founded a game studio worked on Shovel Knight for years after a Kickstarter.
Bungie — Destiny
Bungie was acquired by Microsoft and then spun out again.
Once they spun out they signed the largest publishing deal ever of $500m with Activision. Like mane publishers, Activision tended to stick review score bonuses into contracts, offering extra payouts. A leak showed that Bungie would get a $2.5m payout with a review score of 90 or above.
CD Projekt Red— Witcher 3
A polish video producer which first started selling CDs.
LucasArts — Star Wars 1313
The department went through multiple layoffs. George Lucas kept changing the storyline. Till the whole studio was sold and shut down by Disney.
